Tutorials

Serious climate changes and energy-related environmental problems are currently critical issues in the world. In order to reduce carbon emissions and save our environment, renewable energy harvesting technologies will serve as a key solution in near future. Among them, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), which is one of the promising mechanical energy harvesters by means of contact electrification phenomenon, are explosively developing due to abundant wasting mechanical energy sources and a number of superior advantages in a wide availability and selection of materials, relatively simple device configurations, and low-cost processing.

The seminar aims at providing an insight into human responses to vibration and focuses on the experimental identification of the response of the body to mechanical vibration and on the quantification of the risk deriving from the workers’ vibration exposure. The seminar will start from the definition of the different types of human vibration (hand-arm vibration, whole-body vibration and foot-transmitted vibration). The principal laboratory techniques for determining the biomechanical response (in terms of driving point mechanical impedance, apparent mass or vibration transmissibility) of different body parts will be described. Finally, we will present the measurement techniques for quantifying the exposure at the workplace; one specific case study for each type of human vibration will be presented. The last part of the seminar will cover the possible mitigating actions for the reduction of the vibration exposure.